Schadenfreude

Ah schadenfreude, the wonderful guilty sense of pleasure you get when someone screws up in a big way.  We all get it, even if it's not a very loving feeling to have. 

But I think the entire Oklahoma Democratic Party had a collective orgasm of schadenfreude pleasure this week.

Yesterday, the Oklahoma Republican Party's Facebook page had a post, which has (in the last hour since I started collecting quotes and links for this article) now been taken down.  Fortunately, a cornucopia of sites caught it before they did.  In fact, it's safe to say that this post went viral in a big way:

The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever, to 46 million people.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us "Please Do Not Feed the Animals." Their stated reason for the policy is because "The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves."

Thus ends today's lesson in irony ‪#‎OKGOP‬ (source)

In the 24 hours since, news agencies around the country have picked up the story, noting how the GOP is comparing people in need of financial assistance to wild animals.  Rachel Maddow offers a brilliant takedown of the points in the posting, noting that the food stamp program is not at a high, which she notes is "factually incorrect," and how such a posting shows "evidence of contempt" (emphasis hers) of the poor. 

The OK GOP offered what she calls "a classic non-apology apology," and I think that description is spot-on:

Last night, there was a post on our OKGOP Facebook page, and it was misinterpreted by many. I offer my apologies for those who were offended – that was not my intention.

This post was supposed to be an analogy that compared two situations illustrating the cycle of government dependency in America, not humans as animals.

However I do think that it’s important to have conversations about government welfare programs since our dependency on government is at its highest level ever.
Quoting President Reagan, “We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.”

As read in our Oklahoma Republican Statement of Principles, we believe that “free market principles are the best to stimulate our economic development rather than government subsidies or programs” and I was doing my best to echo that view.

Again, I apologize for any misconceptions that were created.

-Randy

 Which is a great way of blaming us, the readers of the original post, for our reading of it rather than taking ownership of it.

I talk about interpretation a lot.  It is theoretically possible to see the posting as a pure analogy, not saying that people are "no better than animals," but it is an extremely oversimplified analogy as that.  If the original author meant that people and animals share this in common, but that people are capable of thinking and controlling their destinies in ways that animals can't, that's what he should have said.  However, the very analogy depends upon that not being the case - dependency assumes an inability to change your situation, it takes away your "agency" (Wikipedia offers a good definition: "the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity, human or any living being in general, or soul-consciousness in religion) to act in any given environment."  It is part-and-parcel of sentience.  The comparison to animals goes deeper than merely the connection between "animal" and "person" in the analogy.  Humans can be dependent on something without being animals - that is, we are all dependent on our paychecks, for instance.  But the kind of dependency here is one without agency.

I've already talked a bit about how this perception comes about, and seeing that, it's easy to see how the animal analogy comes about. 

One final point, as I close the laptop to run home and cook some pizza, though I did not intend to end the post so quickly: the analogy is also factually wrong for the fact that it perceives animal dependency as bad and equal in kind to human dependency.  But animals had other options before becoming dependent on handouts - they were able to hunt or forage for food.  When they become dependent on handouts, they lose that ability to forage or hunt, and they start eating things that are not a natural part of their diets.  It disrupts the entire ecosystem.  That's why dependency is bad.  Our pets are dependent on us feeding them, and no one complains about that. 

But for humans, we have taken away such options.  You can't hunt without a hunting license and ostensibly some kind of weapon for that purpose.  There is no federal land where you can simply go and pick fruits and vegetables.  You cannot move about to follow animal migrations.  We erect fences and walls and pass trespassing laws to prevent that.  As such, people who, if they were actually animals, might have other options for food and for shelter, who might not need clothing or transportation or education - those people have had those options removed from them by society.  And as such, it's the responsibility of society to provide for their replacement.  It's the responsibility of society to care for people affected by the problems it creates.